Owing to our travel schedule, we missed both of the daytime sessions of General Conference today, and we’ll miss this evening’s session. I regret that. I feel bad about missing any part of Conference. Since my mission — and apart from the four pre-internet years that we spent living in Egypt — I think that all of the conference sessions that I’ve missed could be counted on one hand, with several fingers left over unused. As we were taking off from Salt Lake City International Airport this morning, though, it was a glorious day for the opening sessions of General Conference. Clear and sunny, with rugged snowcapped mountains rising into the blue sky above the valley. Spectacularly beautiful for our international and other guests.
I’ve already been able to read news of today’s conference proceedings, about the releases and about the callings of new General Authorities and general officers. I’ll shortly look through the Deseret News talk summaries; I was struck to see that Elder Neil L. Andersen spoke so strongly about abortion. Fortunately, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, it won’t be very long before I’ve caught up on all of the Saturday conference sessions. And, not long beyond that, I’ll be able to read all of the talks. Which reminds me of my late friend Ann Madsen (my friend Truman Madsen’s widow), and of something that I posted in remembrance of her when she passed away back in 2022:
Once, many years ago, I was over in the old Joseph Smith Building on the BYU campus for some sort of meeting. When that meeting finished, I was trying to decide whether I should walk back to my office in another building, since I had yet another (unrelated) meeting in the Joseph Smith Building less than an hour thereafter. Suddenly, I ran into Ann in the hallway. She was a bit surprised to see me in her building. She was off to teach a class, and she offered to let me sit in her office while I waited for the next meeting to start. That was good, as I had work with me that I could do while biding my time.
I sat down at her desk, in her chair, as she had invited me to do. From that vantage point, I noticed something that nobody else in the office would be able to see: Taped to one of her filing cabinets so that she could easily see and read it, she had a typed-out list of all of the speakers at the most recent installment of the General Conference of the Church. And, next to each name, she had a specific resolution of something that she personally intended to do in response to that speaker’s remarks. I was both inspired and a little shamed by what I saw. Plainly, she was very serious about General Conference in a way that rather put me in the shadow. Since that time, I’ve made sporadic and not very impressive efforts to follow her example. My results have been mixed, but I still remember the standard that she set for me.
Happily, I have a copy of the conference talks from last October’s General Conference with me on this trip.
On Friday night, my wife and I took in a “Broadway at the Eccles” performance of Life of Pi at the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City. I have to admit that I wasn’t especially looking forward to the play. I’ve never read the book and I scarcely remembered the film except that it involved an Indian guy and a Bengal tiger stranded in a small boat at sea and that I didn’t particularly care for the movie. However, I have to say that I really enjoyed the theatrical performance. The staging, for one thing, was extraordinarily clever and effective.
Speaking of movies, though, I briefly recounted a little story the other day about going up to the Salt Lake Valley with my friend Lou Midgley many years ago — to Holladay, I think, although that may be wrong — in order to catch the Sunday evening showing of an anti-Mormon film at an evangelical church. My Malevolent Stalker and his small group of disciples have managed, as they do with almost everything that I say or do, to discern in that account deep evidence of my chronic arrogance, viciousness, and depravity. (Feel free, if you haven’t already done so already, to read my short account: You’ll be stunned at my sheer, unconcealed wickedness. Be sure to keep your smelling salts nearby.) Amusingly, the Stalker finds it revealing that we chose to go to a Protestant church to see the film. That, he says, betrays our sordid and aggressively combative intent. (People who actually know me won’t be surprised to hear that I really, really, really dislike and always try to avoid unpleasant in-person confrontations. But of course, in this case, the person in question is the Peterson of Myth rather than the Peterson of History.) Rather than traveling to that evangelical Church, the Stalker suggests, we should have rented the movie on video (although I have no reason to believe that it was or has ever been available at, say, Blockbuster or Hollywood Video) or streamed it on Netflix (which, so far as I’m aware, didn’t even exist at that time “many years ago”). The Stalker is determined, though. I’ll give him that. He’s been at this, continuously and anonymously, for something like fifteen or twenty years.
Incidentally, at the end of the performance of Life of Pi, the lead actor (Taha Mandviwala) made an appeal, as is often done after such events, for donations to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Afterwards, members of the company stood in the lobby and by the exits with red buckets, QR codes, etc., soliciting the generosity of the departing audience. I don’t blog here about my hypothetical gifts to charity, and it’s an article of faith for the good folks at the Peterson Obsession Board that I’m a callous, hateful, mercenary homophobic bigot, so I suppose that there’s no real point in trying to pretend that we made a contribution. That would be unthinkable. In fact, there can be no doubt whatever that my head almost exploded when we were asked to feel charitable toward . . . such people. (It’s impossible that my anonymous critics could be wrong.)
Posted while waiting for a delayed flight in the Orlando, Florida, airport
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